I see a future off chute business, for high dollar cars at first and maybe lower dollar later. Come in and scan your car to have a digital copy on hand in case of an accident. Go to an approved body shop, give them your CAD files and wait for the insurance. I guess it depends how much detail and money people want to get into.
For a machine of this size, sophistication, and capability, $500,000 isn’t exactly unreasonable either. I’ve worked with a lot less sophisticated equipment that cost a lot more… There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of early adopter upcharge from what I can see from the cheap seats.
I don't see this technology being used to make common or popular parts. Most of those are already being made now. I see it being used for rare and unusual parts that are not made by any company. Wonder when Jay Leno is getting one of these for his garage?
As Gimpy noted - there are a variety of 3D scanners that are now being used to capture the geometry of a surface/part. Once you have a 3D point cloud, it is still totally unintelligent (just a bunch of points in space). Then a polygon mesh is created - and it will have imperfections and holes in it. Complex intersections and areas might need a lot of "hand work" to edit/fix the polygons that were auto generated. Or the scanner can't get into an area to scan it - so areas of the part need to be modeled by hand. After the initial scanning, you usually need to convert it into a more intelligent model - using surfaces and other solid geometry. You might even want some intelligent parametric features with parameters added - to drive hole locations, lengths, widths, flattened vs formed geometry, etc.. After all of that, you hopefully have a clean 3D model (no longer a set of raw points). Once all of that is done, somebody then needs to load it into a CAM system and translate the 3D geometry into "manufacturing features" --> sometimes with fixturing features added as well. After all that is done, then manufacturing operations, tooling and toolpaths can be generated for machines to actually run from. The more complex the geometry (think of all the complexity of the rounded surfaces of fenders), the longer it all takes. Once you get this all done, sure as Hell it isn't 100% correct (it never is), so you make a sample/prototype and then tweak the 3D models, toolpaths, maybe tooling, etc . . . to finally create a part the way you want it to be. To do this for a one-off part is super expensive . . . so, making just "one of anything" takes a lot of money. Now, maybe there is enough demand to make a small batch of parts . . . to help pay for all this up front work. Anyway . . . as Gimpy said, it can all be done . . . but your pockets better be deep and you have to anticipate there will still be a lot of post-processing work to create a final and useable product.
You working in the dark making highly complex metal parts without a welder? Power out shuts down the vast majority of businesses these days.
If it has to fit an existing car perfectly yes, on an older car on which even factory parts fit somewhat it's less of a problem, if it's a complete recreation or an imaginary car like the Tucker prototype as long as parts fit together and they are symetrical it's much less problematic. When I put a '67 Pontiac top on a '61 Cad, I had so much trouble to align it, the car was all original, never been into an accident, never repaired, original paint. When I measured it the car was around 2" longer on one side compared to the other. I ended up eyeballing everything because going by measurement was impossible. Early this year I finished the rebuilding of the front end on an '54 Alfa Romeo race car that had been into a nasty crash, the owner had the car scanned to fabricate a CNC cut wooden buck so I could fabricate the whole front end. The guy who did the CAD work fixed some flaws like a 3/4" height difference between the left and right thinking it was from the accident, the hood opening was perfectly square, except that the original hood wasn't, he also used the wrong diameter headlight that he scaled from old photos instead of asking what they were. All this to say that modern tech precision is not necessarily a good thing on older cars especially hand build ones. So less time can be spent on some areas like the edges that need to be fitted to the car making the part less expensive to produce but more expensive to install.
I think many here are missing the point. I think Rob Ida in the video posted has the right mentality. He's one of the best metal shapers in the country and doesn't feel threatened by this, and in fact, feels it will lead to an uptick of work for him and others like him. Take his fender on the Tucker Carioca for example. It took him 40 hours to make it from scratch. I couldn't imagine shop rate for such work to be less than $100 an hour, likely more, but let's use $100/hr for easy math. That's a $4,000 fender. If the Figur machine can make the same part in an hour, perhaps it might only cost $2000 or $2500 for that same fender. That's a significant savings to the customer when all of those hours are considered over the course of entire build. The tangible reality as Rob sees it, and I agree with him, is that the cost to hand produce a body or part from scratch is so exorbitantly expensive that it becomes prohibitively expensive except to only the most elite of customers. As a result, the project never gets commissioned to get off the ground. It's simply too expensive of an undertaking. On the other hand, if the cost of creating this aspect of the build could come down through the use of CNC metal shaping technology, there is still a necessity for a skilled craftsman to expertly join the pieces, but there is also a greater need for craftsman of all other disciplines in the build because the project is now able to be undertaken.
The software has improved greatly in the last few years, which is to say it has gone from nearly impossible, to just very difficult.
Yes, we can do things today that could only be done by huge corporations with teams of CAD/CAM folks and hardware/software tools that were too expensive for almost any smaller company to afford. The CAD/CAM and CNC machine world has really progressed in the last 5 - 10 years. Here is a picture of a 14-71 competition rotor that I designed - and later produced on a HAAS mill (couple years ago). I could not have imagined having the tools/technology to do this 20 years ago: Here is a rendering that I did for a completed assembly - all in software:
Typical for a hand hammered car. Those Poles created dies and stamp out the cars in aluminum sections then weld them together. Their work is so good many people decide to polish them instead of paint. The company that sells them is Kirkham in Utah. Shelby American buys them for their continuation builds. They give them CSX serial numbers. They add about $40,000 to the price for that aluminum tag that let's you tell your drinking buddies it's a "real" Cobra. https://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/index.shtml Jay has always been an adopter of new tech for making parts. He was one of the first to add a 3D printer to his shop. I'd wager those Duesenberg fender parts sitting on the floor were his.
Interesting technology. Could change the replacement body panel business. I would LOVE some well fitting, reasonably priced replacement fenders for my project cars.
There's an old computer adage, Garbage in, Garbage out. It will be a marvel, but it won't replace a skilled craftsman. That applies to fabrication and repair/restoration. Somebody's got to fit all the panels together!
The Jalopy Journal
